The latest from long-running Japanese noise legend Government Alpha, who has firmly established himself as one of the heaviest, most aggressive dealers of

extreme electronic annihilation, with a style that is reminiscent of both Merzbow's rumbling, cycling white noise blasts, and K.K. Null's propensity for

piercing high-frequency feedback skree ripped out of tortured electric guitars. Continuing the psychotropic violence, Venomous Cumulus Cloud is a

cerebrum-splattering codex of brutal psychedelic feedback collage, a barrage of deafening oscillating white noise and harsh grinding machine textures, broken

distorted beats, and howling vocals strafing through the atmosphere. Total cataclysm, with virtually nothing in the way of quiet respite offered over the

course of the album's 40 minutes. There are a couple of detours though; the malfunctioning computer spasms of "Perfumed Womb" sound like a noisy mutation of

something from Null's Datacide disc and bathes your ears in a sea of hyperactive bleeps and glitch, and "Spiderwort And Dragonfly", despite starting

off with a stuttering blast of digital noise, eventually morphs into one of the sickest noise jams ever, like a death metal band overmodulated and distorted

to the point where the sound becomes a screeching abstract roar racing through a hundred flanger pedals, and coming out the other side as an all-devouring

aural smear of metal wreckage. That one is ungodly heavy. For fans of punishing extreme noise, you cannot go wrong with anything from Government

Alpha, and this ranks as one of his most brutal albums. Venomous Cumulus Cloud is released in a limited edition of 1,000 copies, in the trademark

Troniks wallet jacket that has some sweet psychedelic album cover artwork that reminds me of Mati Klarwein.